My very great grandfather William Sitwell
The Sitwells were celebrated writers. But Sachie, William Sitwell’s grandfather, was unfairly overshadowed by Edith and Osbert
The 2nd October 1988 was an unusual day for me. Thirty years ago, I arrived for my first day at university – at the seemingly bleak, red-brick-and-concrete campus that was the University of Kent.
A little ambivalent about the way my life was moving, I hadn’t thought to visit the place before starting life as a student there. It was my 19th birthday and I literally didn’t know anyone. And the day before, my grandfather had died.
Across every newspaper that day were obituaries of Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. His owl-like features peered out of the pages, his thin lips betraying what I knew so well as a wry smile that could at any time erupt into a fit of giggles. There were acres of newsprint about this man of poetry, this last sibling of a great literary trio. This wonderful man was known to me and close friends and family as Sachie. It is a strange moment when one’s family name is spread across the papers.
But here I was at this bleak, modern establishment – a world away from the ancient buildings, cloisters, traditions and uniform of my previous dwelling, Eton (which was partly the point, to widen my horizon).
I knew no one to console, cheer or chat to me about the fact that – having been dropped off by my mother some hours earlier and checked into a room that felt less homey than a prison cell – my grandpa had died yesterday. And he wasn’t just any old grandpa.
For it had been mine – and my siblings’ – privilege to get to know Sacheverell Sitwell in his final years, after we moved into a wing of the home he lived in after his wife, our grandmother Georgia, had died, eight years before.
That house is Weston Hall, Northamptonshire, where I now live. The desk I sit at in his old dressing room was his desk, at which he wrote his 130 books, as well as newspaper articles and pamphlets of privately published poetry.
Sachie’s output was exhaustive. He wrote on the forgotten painted monasteries of Bucovina in Romania, the art and culture of Japan, the story of English furniture, and studies of the works of Liszt and Mozart. He wrote poems about picking blackberries, or the irritating buzz of a fly as it knocked against a window on a hot summer’s day. From newspaper columns – such as Atticus in the Sunday Times – to his books, he showed a prolific, detailed, exacting and ego-less knowledge and interest in the world, its peoples and its art.
But he was the quietest of the siblings. And he remains today a little underrated, his writings less studied and analysed than theirs.
Edith had her rings – aquamarine stones adorning her almost spookily long fingers. She wore capes and cloaks, vast hats and, as Elizabeth Bowen said, she resembled ‘a high altar on the move’.
And there was Osbert – flamboyant,
confidante of royalty; bitchy socialite; controversial essayist; famous satirist of his own family. Through his own multi-volumed autobiography, he created one of the most famous characters in
literary non-fiction – his father, Sir George Sitwell.
According to Osbert, he invented a revolver for killing wasps and an egg made of condensed milk. He commissioned a herd of cows that were dulling his view to be painted with watercolour. He refused ever to dine with people as it ‘interferes with the functioning of my gastric juices and prevents me from sleeping at night’.
And his relationship with his wife, Lady Ida, was so remote that he refused to clear a debt of hers in 1913. So she was sent to Holloway Prison for three months.
The press feasted on the shenanigans of Edith and Osbert and their frequent feuds with other artists and critics. The critics were gripped by Edith’s Façade poems. Set to music by William Walton – early white rap, if you like – they were performed first through a curtain on a Sengerphone (an early, nonelectric megaphone).
But Sachie was an intrinsic part of the trio. Like the others, he was dedicated to his work: art. With Osbert, he put on exhibitions of some up-and-coming and hitherto unknown artists called Modigliani and Picasso.
‘We did seem to be like rebels,’ he once told me. And while he was never without a shirt, tie and a jacket, his – and his siblings’ –rebellion was aimed at breaking their aristocratic mould. They wanted to pick up the pen, rather than the shotgun.
Sachie may have lived in the beautiful ancestral confines of Weston Hall (descending through a female line of the family since 1714, before Sir George acquired it from an aunt in 1898), yet he always fussed about money and kept to a strict timetable each day.
The floor of his dressing room was covered in piles of books and papers. No one was to walk down the passage while he was working. Gertrude, the housekeeper, could only clean the room when the couple were away.
Sachie’s mind was extraordinary. His books are filled with the names of gypsies and princes, and details of temples and cities. Even in old age, his mind darted about during conversation.
‘Did you know there was a shop in Ootacamund that sold Dundee cake… I once met a lavatory attendant at the Café Royal called Sigmundo Pandolfa Malatesta, who was descended from the tyrants of Rimini.’
Born in 1897, he once told an interviewer, as he neared his late eighties, ‘It’s wonderful to be alive.’
At that age, he would sit in a chair in the drawing room at Weston, surrounded by copies of his own books on the floor. He puffed on Silk Cut cigarettes, smoking them like cigars, rather than inhaling deeply.
He couldn’t pronounce ‘th’. ‘I heard really v most fearfully funny fing v uvver day…’
He would tell a joke and descend into schoolboy giggles.
I suppose he got a little dotty towards the end of his life. His polite way of saying he was bored with someone’s company would be to say: ‘You will come back and see me again before too long, won’t you?’
He might say this three minutes after a visitor arrived.
A local writer once came to visit him. Over lunch, Sachie asked him: ‘Do you know that frightful bore Simon Melville [not his real name]? He will not stop coming to see me v whole time.’
‘Well, Sachie,’ replied the guest, ‘I am Simon Melville.’
He once slipped down the stairs while climbing them to bed – an ascent that always followed his announcement: ‘I fink I might retire to my apartment.’
He sat there while help was called, wailing: ‘Torment. Torment.’
Sachie was the only one of his siblings to marry, having fallen in love with a Canadian beauty, Georgia Doble, when she visited London in the 1920s. They had two sons, Reresby and then Francis, my father. The marriage effectively split the trio and Sachie spent the ensuing decades on his own work. Prolific, funny, extraordinary…
Having emboldened myself to enter the junior common room bar on that first night at Kent, I made some friends. They sang me happy birthday and we drank to the memory of Sachie. It wasn’t such a bad start after all.